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Why are USA maternal health numbers so poor for an industrialized country?

Maternal Mortality

I went to Northampton, MA for New Year’s Eve and the general period of days around it. The people we were staying with are good friends of ours, and the female in that dynamic (my wife’s college roommate, in fact)… Continue Reading

If you’re a woman looking to get married, move west of the Mississippi

The job market is killing the marriage market, meaning that women want some stability (i.e. a job) in the men they end up with — and because of the economy and our godforsaken hiring practices, the percentage of men with… Continue Reading

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Exploring white attitudes on African-Americans in prisons

The whole topic of racial attitudes around incarnation is very fraught — and also very complicated, as entire bodies of research are penned on it across people’s careers. I can’t begin to scratch the surface. I do know this, as… Continue Reading

Humans and Neanderthals may have overlapped in Europe for 5,400 years

These numbers are way different than what we thought earlier, and speaks to the idea of interbreeding. Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Bing World Cup prediction engine on Cortana virtual assistant is 12-for-12 at predicting games

Microsoft added a World Cup prediction engine to the Cortana virtual assistant program on June 28th (about two weeks after the World Cup actually began). Since then, it’s 12-for-12 at predicting winners. That’s absurd, because those 12 games involve Costa Rica’s… Continue Reading

Brief thought exercise: has modern politics mostly become about Big Data and targeting?

Famous narrative of Obama winning in 2008 (and again in 2012) was that the Democratic machine had better data, analysis, and targeting methods. This has been discussed for years. The Republicans have a good deal of problems at the national… Continue Reading

The future of politics (are you listening, Rand Paul?) could be addressable advertising

It seems like people have been discussing this idea of “what Big Data can really do” for years without tremendously tangible day-to-day results (possibly because of this and this). Still, it seems logical that as SmartPhones become the primary gadget… Continue Reading

The two “next big things” for tech are the mobile space and data. As such, is Facebook about to overtake Google?

You can certainly make a case that the Internet/tech world is shifting a bit. Mobile is “the next big thing,” and that space hurts Google — phrased simply, there’s less space for ads; phrased in a more complicated way, Google does know what… Continue Reading